Friday, May 10, 2019

Court documents said the analyst gave classified documents to a reporter that were published on a news site federal officials have confirmed was The Intercept.

May 9, 2019, 7:09 AM PDT

By Pete Williams

WASHINGTON — A former Air Force enlisted man who served as an intelligence analyst and government contractor was charged Thursday with illegally giving classified information to a reporter.

A spokesman for the Justice Department said Daniel Everette Hale, 31, of Nashville, Tennessee, was arrested Thursday morning and would make his initial appearance there later in the day.

Court documents said Hale gave more than a dozen classified documents to the reporter that were then published in whole or in part on a news website. Though the documents did not name either the journalist or the news organization, federal officials confirmed that the reporter was Jeremy Scahill, and the online news site was The Intercept. Scahill is listed on the website as one of its three founding editors.

A grand jury indictment said Hale met the reporter at an April 29, 2013 book tour event in Washington, which started several months of conversations between them, in person and through an encrypted messaging app.

The FBI said while working as a contractor at the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, Hale printed out 11 secret or top-secret documents describing U.S. counterterrorism operations overseas under the administration of President Barack Obama. Court documents said one described a military campaign targeting al Qaeda and another contained information gathered by U.S. intelligence about "specific named targets."

Prosecutors said that of nearly two dozen documents Hale printed that were unrelated to his work as a contractor, he provided at least 17 to Scahill or The Intercept. Scahill published a book, "Dirty Wars: The World Is a Battlefield," and wrote about drones for The Intercept. He also made a documentary film, "Dirty Wars."

In a statement posted on its website Thursday, The Intercept said it "does not comment on matters relating to the identity of anonymous sources."

James Risen, director of First Look Media’s Press Freedom Defense Fund, said Hale's prosecution "amounts to an abuse of the Espionage Act to criminalize the process of reporting."The indictment charging Hale said the documents he provided "were published by the Reporter's Online News Outlet and compiled and published in a book authored by the Reporter."

"The source said he decided to provide these documents to The Intercept because he believes the public has a right to understand the process by which people are placed on kill lists and ultimately assassinated on orders from the highest echelons of the U.S. government," the article said.

The Intercept quoted the source as saying, "This outrageous explosion of watchlisting — of monitoring people and racking and stacking them on lists, assigning them numbers, assigning them ‘baseball cards,’ assigning them death sentences without notice, on a worldwide battlefield — it was, from the very first instance, wrong."

Hale was charged with illegally obtaining and disclosing classified national defense information and theft of government property.

In August 2018, a former contractor for the NSA, Reality Winner, was sentenced to five years in prison for leaking classified documents to The Intercept that detailed Russian efforts to hack into the computers of a company that made software for local election officials. She pleaded guilty to mailing the documents to the news site.

Keep these in mind as you contemplate the direction of the American government over the past 50 years and especially since the Obama election.

The Goals of Communism

(as read into the congressional record January 10, 1963, from "The Naked Communist" by Cleon Skousen)

1. U.S. acceptance of coexistence as the only alternative to atomic war.

2. U.S. willingness to capitulate in preference to engaging in atomic war.

3. Develop the illusion that total disarmament of the United States would be a demonstration of moral strength.

4. Permit free trade between all nations regardless of Communist affiliation and regardless of whether or not items could be used for war.

5. Extension of long-term loans to Russia and Soviet satellites.

6. Provide American aid to all nations regardless of Communist domination.

7. Grant recognition of Red China. Admission of Red China to the U.N.

8. Set up East and West Germany as separate states in spite of Khrushchev's promise in 1955 to settle the German question by free elections under supervision of the U.N.

9. Prolong the conferences to ban atomic tests because the United States has agreed to suspend tests as long as negotiations are in progress.

10. Allow all Soviet satellites individual representation in the U.N.

11. Promote the U.N. as the only hope for mankind. If its charter is rewritten, demand that it be set up as a one-world government with its own independent armed forces. (Some Communist leaders believe the world can be taken over as easily by the U.N. as by Moscow. Sometimes these two centers compete with each other as they are now doing in the Congo.)

12. Resist any attempt to outlaw the Communist Party.

13. Do away with all loyalty oaths.

14. Continue giving Russia access to the U.S. Patent Office.

15. Capture one or both of the political parties in the United States.

16. Use technical decisions of the courts to weaken basic American institutions by claiming their activities violate civil rights.

17. Get control of the schools. Use them as transmission belts for socialism and current Communist propaganda. Soften the curriculum. Get control of teachers' associations. Put the party line in textbooks.

18. Gain control of all student newspapers.

19. Use student riots to foment public protests against programs or organizations which are under Communist attack.

20. Infiltrate the press. Get control of book-review assignments, editorial writing, policymaking positions.

21. Gain control of key positions in radio, TV, and motion pictures.

22. Continue discrediting American culture by degrading all forms of artistic expression. An American Communist cell was told to "eliminate all good sculpture from parks and buildings, substitute shapeless, awkward and meaningless forms."

27. Infiltrate the churches and replace revealed religion with "social" religion. Discredit the Bible and emphasize the need for intellectual maturity which does not need a "religious crutch."

28. Eliminate prayer or any phase of religious expression in the schools on the ground that it violates the principle of "separation of church and state."

29. Discredit the American Constitution by calling it inadequate, old-fashioned, out of step with modern needs, a hindrance to cooperation between nations on a worldwide basis.

30. Discredit the American Founding Fathers. Present them as selfish aristocrats who had no concern for the "common man."

31. Belittle all forms of American culture and discourage the teaching of American history on the ground that it was only a minor part of the "big picture." Give more emphasis to Russian history since the Communists took over.

32. Support any socialist movement to give centralized control over any part of the culture--education, social agencies, welfare programs, mental health clinics, etc.

33. Eliminate all laws or procedures which interfere with the operation of the Communist apparatus.

34. Eliminate the House Committee on Un-American Activities.

35. Discredit and eventually dismantle the FBI.

36. Infiltrate and gain control of more unions.

37. Infiltrate and gain control of big business.

38. Transfer some of the powers of arrest from the police to social agencies. Treat all behavioral problems as psychiatric disorders which no one but psychiatrists can understand.

39. Dominate the psychiatric profession and use mental health laws as a means of gaining coercive control over those who oppose Communist goals.

40. Discredit the family as an institution. Encourage promiscuity and easy divorce.

41. Emphasize the need to raise children away from the negative influence of parents. Attribute prejudices, mental blocks and retarding of children to suppressive influence of parents.

42. Create the impression that violence and insurrection are legitimate aspects of the American tradition; that students and special-interest groups should rise up and use united force to solve economic, political or social problems.

43. Overthrow all colonial governments before native populations are ready for self-government.

44. Internationalize the Panama Canal.

45. Repeal the Connally reservation so the United States cannot prevent the World Court from seizing jurisdiction over nations and individuals alike.